Monday, December 23, 2013

CT - Problems With Drug, Sex Offender Zones

Do crime-free zones around schools and other places where children gather actually protect children?

The question will be aired in the next session of the General Assembly because of two proposals, one that seeks to reduce the size of drug-free zones around schools and another that would create zones around schools where sex offenders couldn't live.

The Connecticut Sentencing Commission has unanimously approved a recommendation to scale back the state's drug-free zone from 1,500 feet to 200 feet of school property. Meanwhile, two legislators are proposing a bill that would prohibit registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of a school or day-care center.

All communities want to protect children from harm, but there are serious questions whether protective zones achieve that goal. The Courant supports the contraction of drug zones and opposes the creation of sex offender zones.

Drugs

Connecticut and many other states created drug-free zones in the 1980s as a get-tough response to the surge in crack cocaine use. The goal was to protect children by increasing the penalties for anyone caught selling or possessing drugs within 1,000 feet of a school. The law has since expanded to 1,500 feet and now includes day care centers and public housing projects.

Advocates say it is a deterrent. Some researchers don't think so. For example, In 2001 former Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General William Brownsberger reviewed 443 drug cases in three cities — Springfield, New Bedford and Fall River — and found that 80 percent of the cases occurred in drug-free school zones, and only 1 percent of cases involved minors.

The findings might be more extreme in Connecticut. The state's larger cities have scores of schools, day care centers and public housing projects crowded onto relatively small (except for Stamford) geographical areas. The result is that the zones overlap; in New Haven and Hartford they cover virtually the entire cities. As Mr. Brownsberger said, if every place is a stay-away zone, no place is a stay-away zone.

The result is what some call the "urban effect," higher penalties in urban areas for the same crime — which, as members of the legislature's Black and Puerto Rican Caucus pointed out last year, disproportionally impacts blacks and Latinos.

Sex Offenders

If the sex offender proposal becomes law, overlapping 1,000-foot zones will restrict offenders from living almost anywhere in Hartford, New Haven or Bridgeport. Where do they go?

Although residency restrictions may make sense in individual cases — and are sometimes imposed as conditions of probation — blanket residency restrictions are highly dubious.

They are fueled in part by the notion of "stranger danger," the idea that most child molesters are strangers, sinister perverts in trench coats lurking around the school playground. But the research says the vast majority of child sexual abuse victims identify their abusers as family members or acquaintances. A Justice Department study in 2000 of police reports from 12 states found that only 7 percent of sexual assaults on children were perpetrated by strangers. (The data are similar for adult female victims.)

Also, many people assume that everyone on the registry is either a rapist or pedophile. But it also includes an array of porn possessors, voyeurs and people who as older teenagers had consensual sex with an underage girlfriend or boyfriend.

Some on the list are dangerous and must be watched, but many are not. The state has pretty good assessment tools to determine which offenders might be dangerous to women and children, and treatment programs that work. State counselors use residency restrictions on a case-by-case basis, and there is no reason to change that system.